Link Wheel - Have You Tried It?

uix_expanduix_collapse

Member

A link wheel is an SEO technique utilizing multiple Web 2.0 blogging platforms to interlink articles, that is one of the most effective ways to target a specific keyword and get to the first page on Google.

You can increase the power of your link wheel by using social bookmarking websites.

This is a very effective strategy because you’ll be getting a lot of backlinks to your site which will help you rank easily in search engines.

The only downside of this strategy is, it takes a LOT of time. Why? because you need to make unique articles to each of your web 2.0 websites and you also need to create unique accounts for your social networking websites.

uix_expanduix_collapse

Member

How this Link wheel works? please give us more info about this link wheel.

Click to expand...

Link wheel works like this..

Imagine that there are three sites. The 1st one gives its own link to the 2nd one, the 2nd one gives its own link to the 3rd one, and the 3rd one gives its own link to the 1st one. So, we recieve a circle, or a wheel.
But as far as I know Google doesn't like such a wheel anymore and Google easily calculates the sites which have chosen to promote themselves with the help of such link wheels.

uix_expanduix_collapse

Member

Can anyone answer the very important question of "Have link wheels been impacted by Panda?" And also, is there any likelihood that google will catch on to your link wheel and punish you for it? Is such a thing documented as having happened?

uix_expanduix_collapse

Member

Can anyone answer the very important question of "Have link wheels been impacted by Panda?"

Click to expand...

It's not really a relevant question. Panda hit sites based on the quality, not in relation to spammy links. Link wheels fall under search spam rather than search quality, but the two are certainly linked in various ways. Some wheels will have been hit real hard and others not at all, depending on the quality and the type of content on the linking sites, but the real issues with wheels have nothing to do with Panda any more than for any other algorithmic change.

Some publishers have fixated on our prior Panda algorithm change, but Panda was just one of roughly 500 search improvements we expect to roll out to search this year. In fact, since we launched Panda, we've rolled out over a dozen additional tweaks to our ranking algorithms, and some sites have incorrectly assumed that changes in their rankings were related to Panda. Search is a complicated and evolving art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users.

is there any likelihood that google will catch on to your link wheel and punish you for it?

Click to expand...

Yes. The vast majority of link wheels will be devalued instantly to the point that it's a waste of time/resources engaging in it. Depending on the scale of the problems and various other factors, it could result in penalties right up to full deindexing of a site. For more cleverly implemented ones that do manage to slip under the radar, the algorithmic changes that Google continually make are to try and identify exactly these kinds of 'tricks' (in a scalable and automated fashion) and eliminate the effectiveness all the time.

I'm not saying the algorithms are perfect or that we're at a stage where these techniques can't still give great (short term) rankings (it's far from the case and there's still far too much muck like them around that does work), but it's a huge risk to take and it's a far better investment to focus on doing it naturally and avoid having to constantly look over your shoulder waiting for that axe to fall.

When a site gets burned there's no direct tie back to the cause like that to give irrefutable evidence, so I'm not sure you could directly tie back any site being deindexed to link wheels specifically. The other problem is that a site engaging in one form of search manipulation commonly engages in various other forms, so picking out the single cause that was the final straw is all but impossible. Having said that, flick through the official Google Webmaster Help Forum and you'll see plenty of evidence of sites having issues with penalties and deindexing which include (sometimes as a major factor) link wheels.

About Us

Business Advice Forum is a very active, friendly webmaster and business forum, where members can get advice and support for their small business or website. The majority of our discussions relate to online business, with the majority of the members being webmasters.